


Thunderstorm

by Boomgardener



Category: Original Work
Genre: Disabled Character, Drama, Family Fluff, Gen, Jewish Character, Middle School, Minor Violence, One Shot, Original Character(s), Original Female Character(s) - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-22 05:17:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14301597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Boomgardener/pseuds/Boomgardener
Summary: Hael Cohen, a hard-of-hearing eighth grader, thought she overcame the bullying from two of her classmates. Then they shoved her into a dark room. Relatively short one shot featuring two sisters.





	Thunderstorm

The night before Hael Cohen slapped Macy Zimmerman across her face and drew blood, a spring storm rolled in from the prairie far beyond the lakeshore suburbs. Thunder clapped a half-mile from the house and rattled the windows in all the bedrooms. Hael crawled into her sister’s bed. Nothing else could harm her there, and she and Salem protected each other the way they always had.

Hael knew the sound she made against Macy’s face must have been similar. Blood surfaced on her cheek where there had been four fingernails, the skin screaming red under her hand. Macy may have yelled, since her mouth opened wide as she covered her cheek in shock.

There was no remorse about it. Not even as Coach Franklin yanked Salem off of Kate Gutierrez or pulled Hael away with a more delicate hand and led all four of them to the principal’s office. Macy glared at her from the other side of Coach Franklin’s wide, dark blue pullover. Hael stared blankly back at her.

It was a slow-burning kind of torment that led Hael to leave her handprint on Macy’s face. Back in August, they were assigned to the same eighth grade homeroom, science class and American history class, plus the same lunch period. Being paired with the same groups of students for that many periods was common, but Macy and Kate took an immediate, morbid fascination with Hael.

At first, Hael had wondered if it was her hair. The way her wiry blonde curls stuck out in all directions was something she embraced, but it didn’t match the way most of the girls at school straightened their hair. Macy even regularly asked if she straightened it when she thought Hael wouldn’t notice she meant it mockingly. Other possible causes crossed her mind as well: Her last name couldn’t be more Jewish, she knew she talked strangely compared to everyone else, and she had erroneously spent the first few weeks of school in the special education class even though she didn’t need it.

The real reason struck her when Kate told something to Macy at lunch one day, covering her hand so Hael couldn’t read their lips. The biggest reason was because they thought she couldn’t understand them at all.

Hael navigated the world through a combination of lip-reading and speech therapy, plus the occasional help of a sign language interpreter. It didn’t take long for Hael to realize then that Kate and Macy had probably been talking about her behind her back since the beginning of the year, asking her questions and then stepping away to laugh about how she answered them.

She was frustrated enough a few times to cry in the arms of her mother, father or Salem, but she mostly had put up with the torment until the day she struck Macy.

That day, she was already staying at school late, helping paint a mural in the hall outside the gym while Salem was at figure skating practice across the street. She had noticed Macy and Kate watching her from further down the hall, staring at her as they spoke, mouths covered again.

At the time, Hael had just sighed, shook her head and reached for the bucket of orange paint from her spot on the hole-mottled tarp. There were three other students and the art club supervisor working on the mural, and the girls wouldn’t bother her while they were all there painting a scene of a firebird rising from out of the concrete blocks.

She could lose herself in the design she made and watch it come to life for a while. She did it every time. The phoenix always rose in front of her, spitting embers as it fluttered its wings in flight from the caldera of a stirring, dormant volcano. From the ashes in its wake would come the first verdant blossoms of the new spring, gasping as they finally found the sun and bloomed pink and gold and blue.

Still, even after the firebird was freed from its volcanic prison and most other members of the art club had gone home for the day, she could see both girls standing there with their gladiator sandals and fake Louis Vuitton handbags, watching her. She thought she had seen the word ‘retarded’ pass Kate’s lips at one point--a word Kate drizzled into her vocabulary as liberally as she did ranch dressing on pizza. The rest of the conversation was lost. Hael was paying more mind to picking up the tarp and leftover brushes, plus the prospect of catching Salem in her last few minutes of practice.

The tarp dragged across the floor like the beige train of a wedding dress when Hael carried it and the brushes toward the bathroom next to the gym. Ignore them, her father had said to her a few months ago. A lion would only regret getting involved in the affairs of the sheep that jumped on it while it slept. Her orange- and red-stained paint brushes required more attention. She rounded the corner toward the girls’ bathroom.

The tarp flew over her head and she felt someone shove their hands hard between her shoulder blades. Hael stumbled forward, shouting in surprise. There was cold, hard tile beneath her and the tarp, plus a firecracker of pain whistling through her elbows after she landed on them. The lights beyond the holes of the tarp went black.

\-----

It will be a sunny Thursday in October when Hael Cohen, in her freshman year at the Savannah College of Art and Design, sees a group of students signing to each other on a bench outside Haymans Hall. What friends she’ll have made already won’t know how to sign, but they all like old anime and Mexican restaurants, so she’ll decide to stick around. Still, she will think it would be nice to have friends who could sign, who wouldn’t eventually ask why she talks that way, who will understand what it means to feel like you’re looking at the crowded world from the outside.

She will stroll over to them with her tote bag of notebooks as they talk about a professor named Pulaski and introduce herself, asking if they live near campus and smiling with excitement and hope rising in her chest. One of the girls will start to introduce herself as Gina and tell Hael where she lives, but she’ll be stopped short.

One of the boys, one with dark hair and plastic frame glasses, will ask with a serious look on his face, “Are you Deaf or hard of hearing?”

Hael will look at him nervously, wondering if he’s boring a hole into her soul through the dark blue of her eyes. “Hard of hearing,” she'll finally answer.

The boy will glare at her like she’s stolen money from him. “Sorry. Deaf only.”

Gina’s eyebrows will furrow. “Xavi, she could join us...”

“No.” Xavi will glare at Hael even more. “We’re Deaf only.”

Speechless, Hael will walk away alone, trying to swallow the rapidly forming lump in her throat. She suddenly will find part of herself wishing that she couldn’t hear the thunder clapping outside her window as a child, or even the still-muted distilled sound of her sister screaming after she won the right to compete in the ISU Junior Grand Prix at fourteen years old. She will have only read horror stories about this before, of the death threats sent to deaf musicians or debate about whether the hard-of-hearing should marry hearing people or deaf people, but none of them will ever like more than a thunderstorm beyond a distant hill until that moment.

That will be before Gina gets on her bike and tracks Hael down to see her again.

\-----

There was an invisible badge of honor Hael wore at school on the breast of her pastel-colored cardigans--one that she had earned for being surprisingly sharp-tongued. Yet, as she sat on the floor in the inky black of the bathroom, frantically texting Salem with her phone gasping on 2% of its battery, she wept. Macy and Kate had made fun of her before, and she had always just insulted them right back and called them things like “horse face and rat face,” but it had never gotten physical.

_‘Please come to the bathroom by the gym. Macy and Kate shoved me in here and I can’t find the light.’_

Sent.

_‘I’ll be there in 2 minutes.’_

The rough fabric of the tarp pooled around Hael’s legs as she stood, knees trembling. She sobbed again, wiping her tears on the sleeve of her pink cardigan.

A small, red-hot spark of rage smoldered in her chest. Hael had never fought anyone before, but she figured now was as good of a first time as any. She knew she’d get in trouble. She didn’t care.

Reaching through the pitch, Hael found the concrete wall. Running her hand slowly along, she felt a blast of warm air on her forearm--the hand dryer. A few inches to the right were the sinks, the top of the trough above the faucets flecked with pools of cold water and spilled foam soap. Then there was more concrete wall as she crept along, knowing the tarp was nearby and not wanting to worsen things by tripping over it.

Hael felt the plastic of the light switch beneath her fingertips. She fumbled with it for a second before flipping it upward, illuminating the room. Then, the door swung inward.

There Salem was, still breathing hard and with a lone pinball of sweat trekking from her dark brown bob down her temple from two hours of practicing her free skate. Hael hugged her anyway.

“Are you hurt?” Salem signed, pursing her lips.

“Not physically,” Hael answered, looking away. “I landed on my elbows, but it doesn’t really hurt. I wouldn’t mind getting back at those two though.”

“I’ll take care of them--”

Hael shook her head and grabbed Salem’s arm. “Let me have a swing at one of them.”

Salem looked at her for one second, then another. “Hael, you’ll get in trouble if you do that.”

“I know,” Hael replied. “I’m okay with that. They’ve been bothering me all year because they think I’m weaker than them. I need to prove to them I’m not, even if it means I get in trouble.”

Concern colored Salem’s brown eyes. Finally, she said, “Okay. But you shouldn’t have to prove anything.”

Even though Salem still smelled a little like sweat and felt sticky, Hael welcomed the next long hug from her sister. Salem was growing taller and faster than Hael and was the strongest girl she knew. She pulled the door open with one hand and looked back at Hael as they set out to deliver justice. The tarp and brushes could wait.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm open to constructive criticism! I just wanted to use this piece to play a little bit with my prose and to explore Salem and Hael a little bit more as characters. Thank you for reading!!


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